How do children learn their first words? Do they do it by gradually accumulating information about the co-occurrence of words and their referents over time, or are words learned via quick social inferences linking what ...

The origins and adaptive significance of music, long an elusive target, are now active topics of empirical study. I argue that empirical results can constrain discussions of the adaptive significance of music by testing ...

Studies in the past decade have established gene expression as an inherently variable process. Accompanying this exciting finding is a fundamental question: how do physiological events, such as cell fate specification, ...

Complex synthetic genetic programs promise unprecedented control over cellular metabolism and behavior. In this thesis, I describe the design and development of a synthetic genetic program to detect conditions underlying ...

To what extent can experience shape perception? In what ways does perception vary across people or even within the same person at different times? This thesis presents three lines of research examining the role of experience ...

The ease with which we recognize visual objects belies the computational difficulty of this feat. Despite the concerted efforts of both biological and computer vision research communities over the last forty years, human-level ...

Face recognition is one of the most important problems our visual system must solve. Here I used magnetoencephalography (MEG) in an effort to characterize the sequence of cognitive and neural processes underlying this ...

This thesis describes the use of mathematical, statistical, and computational methods to analyze, in two paradigmatic areas, what the hippocampus and associated structures do, and how they do it. The first model explores ...